Chapter 4: Technical SEO
Googlebot is the web crawler used by Google to gather the information needed and build the index of web pages that are used to provide search results. It is an automated software program that uses algorithms to determine which pages to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.
Googlebot works by following links on the web, starting with a list of URLs from past crawls and sitemaps provided by website owners. It then visits each of these websites, downloads the content, and follows the links on those pages to discover new URLs.
The crawler processes each page it visits to extract links, meta tags, and other information that can be used to understand the content of the page. This information is then used to determine how to index the page and how it should rank in search results.
Googlebot is an important part of the search engine's indexing and ranking process, and understanding how it works can help website owners optimize their sites for better search visibility. Likewise, the same also holds true for Bingbot, which is Microsoft’s web crawler.